Yearly Archives: 2009

Worrying about the stimulus

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By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor

    “This is your bill; it needs to be America’s bill.”

            — Sen. Lindsey Graham,
         addressing Senate Democrats

What
worries me, after all the rhetoric, exhortation, accusations,
counter-accusations, fault-finding and blame-laying, is that the
stimulus bill that spent the week staggering its way through the U.S.
Senate might not work anyway.

     There was always
that very good chance. Several weeks back, Paul Krugman — who as a
Princeton economist is a Nobel Prize-winner, but as a political
columnist is a partisan automaton — said as much. He said it wouldn’t
be enough to give the economy the jolt it needs to overcome the lack of
activity in the private sector. He made a persuasive case.

    Then,
last week, Mr. Krugman wrote that this bill just had to pass, that
those blasted Republicans opposing it were “putting the nation’s future
at risk.” Obama’s mistake, he now said, was trying “to transcend
partisanship” and work with the Republicans at all.

    I believe the
exact opposite to be true. I believe the chances of the bill doing any
good declined with each step into the thicket of partisanship.

    I
never won so much as a Cracker Jack prize for economics, much less a
Nobel, but there’s one thing I think I understand: Whatever Washington
does in the way of stimulus — and it needs to do something (with the
private sector in paralysis, this is a job for the Keynesians) — it
won’t work unless America can believe in it.

    Just as Mr. Krugman
is right about some things, so is Phil Gramm. Remember how indignant
the Democrats got when the McCain adviser said, in mid-campaign, that
we were experiencing a “mental recession”? Well, he had a point. While
it doesn’t make the real-life pain any less, the mechanisms that get us
into a predicament like this have an awful lot to do with what’s going
on in our heads.

    When businesses think they have a chance to
grow, they invest and create jobs. When they’re scared, they freeze up.
When buyers and sellers believe home values will keep appreciating, the
real estate market is hot. When they start to doubt values, buying and
selling stop. When everyone believes a stock’s value will keep rising,
it does keep rising; when they don’t, it crashes. When you think the
lousy economy is threatening your job, you stop spending and stuff your
earnings, literally or figuratively, into a mattress, and the workers
who depended on you to buy what they produce lose their jobs, which of
course increases everyone’s pessimism.

    No, it’s not all in our
heads. At some point, certain things have real value. But we’re not
going to start buying and selling and hiring and investing and taking
risks at the levels needed to pull ourselves out of this tail-spin
until we reach a consensus that things are getting better, or about to
get better.

    You can argue about the specific provisions in the
stimulus all you want, and Democrats and Republicans have been doing so
enthusiastically. But I don’t think I’ve seen a specific idea yet that
couldn’t be argued both ways. Even the worst idea pumps some juice into
the economy; even the best one is no silver bullet.

    With private
sector leadership — especially on Wall Street — having failed us so
spectacularly, we need something intangible from our political
leadership every bit as much as we need infrastructure spending and/or
tax cuts: We need to look at what Washington is producing and believe
that it actually is for the good of the country, and not for the good
of the Democrats or the Republicans or this or that politician.

    As
he entered office, I thought Barack Obama had what it took to lead us
in that direction — to pull us together and help us believe that we can
solve our problems. To persuade us, as FDR did, that we had nothing to
fear, that we were going to get through this, together.

    I still
think he can. But last week, I saw him stumble. I’m not talking about
the Tom Daschle business. As the stimulus package faltered, he reverted
to campaign mode, blaming Republicans who wanted to cling to those
failed policies of the past eight years we heard so much about in 2008.

    Helping
him in this counterproductive effort were such Republicans as our own
Jim DeMint, who most certainly was clinging to the ideologies that have
failed his party and the nation — such as the stubborn idea that tax
cuts are the only kind of stimulus anyone needs.

    A far more
sensible position was taken by our other senator late Thursday. Lindsey
Graham grabbed headlines by saying “this bill stinks,” but he had
smarter things to say than that:

    You know, my problem is that I
think we need a stimulus bill. I think we need to do more than cut
taxes. But the process has been terrible. The House passed this bill
without one Republican vote, lost 11 Democrats. Nancy Pelosi said, We
won, we write the bill…. (W)e’re not being smart and we’re not
working together, and people want us to be smart and work together, and
this has been a miserable failure on both fronts.

    As I wrote this
column, much remained unsettled. By the time you read it, something may
have passed. But as I wrote, I was sure of this: If the Congress gave
the president a bill that was pleasing only to the Harry Reids and
Nancy Pelosis, it wouldn’t help the president inspire the kind of
confidence that the whole nation needs to recover. (The same would be
true if Jim DeMint got all he wanted, but there was no danger of that.)

    But
if the president has a bill that Lindsey Graham and John McCain and Ben
Nelson of Nebraska and Susan Collins of Maine all voted for, the nation
would have a chance of moving forward together. And together is the
only way we can recover.

For more, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.

Caterpillar view of ‘Buy American’

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Just now got to this e-mail of a letter from two officials with Caterpillar up in Greenville about the "Buy American" provision in Nancy Pelosi's version of the stimulus. All of our pages through Monday are now done, so on the off chance that the letter might get outdated before we could run it, and since the subject has been on my mind, I'll go ahead and run their missive here:

“Buy American” provisions could kill American jobs

Caterpillar is a proud American company. We were born in California, made our home in Illinois and maintained a strong U.S. manufacturing base that serves the global marketplace. Caterpillar laid roots in the Greenville area in 1994, beginning with the Greenville Engine Center (GEC). Our operations now include the GEC, Caterpillar Logistics Services, Inc., and the Marine Center of Excellence.  We are also proud of our global footprint that allows us to compete and support Cat equipment throughout the world. Today more than half of what we produce in the U.S. is exported to markets outside the United States.

We are also a company that will benefit from the infrastructure component of the proposed $825 billion U.S. stimulus package.  But there is one element of the stimulus proposal that greatly concerns us — it's the “Buy American” provisions.  Why would an American company be against a provision that forces the U.S. government to only buy American products?  Our reasons go beyond our confidence that we can compete and win business because of the value of the products we produce.

Today, countries from Asia to Europe are pursuing similar infrastructure packages to stimulate their economies.  In some cases, like China, these proposed projects are more ambitious than those in the United States.

This is our concern.  Caterpillar would like to sell U.S.-made products to infrastructure projects at home and abroad.  But if the U.S. sends the message that regardless of value, countries should only buy locally produced products, Caterpillar's exports, as well as the U.S. jobs they support, will be hurt. In some of our Illinois factories, as much as 70 percent of what we make is sold overseas. Over half of the engines produced in Greenville are for export use including those most recently “in-sourced” from our European factories.  That’s not surprising given that 95 percent of the world’s consumers live outside our borders, and most infrastructure growth is occurring in the developing world.

It's hard to be against something that sounds as patriotic as "Buying American."  But turning inward and embracing protectionism is what turned a bad recession in the 1930s into the Great Depression. Let’s show some political courage and learn lessons from the past. Our country doesn’t need to isolate itself from the international economy. Rather, we need policies that will help us improve competitiveness and grow.  For starters we need a "National Export Strategy” that keeps U.S.-made goods in demand globally, U.S.-based companies competitive and U.S. workers employed—including tens of thousands of Caterpillar and supplier employees.  The approval of these “provisions”, as they are written, could have a devastating impact on the operations of the Greenville Engine Center, Cat Logistics and the Marine Center of Excellence, as well as the lives of our employees and their families.

John Downey
Facility Manager
Large Power Systems Division
Caterpillar Inc.

Josh Frey
Facility Manager
Caterpillar Logistics Services, Inc.
Caterpillar Inc.

Amen to letter debunking Reagan tax ‘reform’

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Just now remembered that I meant to say a big "Amen!" to the third of these letters that ran on Thursday:

Reagan tax policies began economic slide

I think that if I read one more letter praising Ronald Reagan’s tax policies I will be sick.

I
was in the tax business when his 1986 tax reform act was passed. This
act was revenue-neutral. The cut in the top brackets was accomplished
by cutting numerous deductions that the middle class enjoyed. My own
taxes increased more than $2,500.

The idea, of course, was that
those in the top brackets would create jobs and products. The problem
was the middle class had less money to purchase the products.

From
that point on, the discrepancy in accumulated wealth between the middle
and upper classes began to widen, and the government deficit began to
increase.

If you want real tax reform, I have a suggestion: Allow
those who take the standard deduction also to take their charitable
deductions. This would result in churches and other charities being
able to meet the increasing demands they are facing in this current
economy.

WILLIAM R. GEDDINGS JR.
West Columbia

The first year that tax "reform" took effect was my first year at The State. I had taken a big pay cut to come here from Wichita (I SO wanted to be close to all of y'all and I really, REALLY wanted to get the heck out of Kansas). I mean a big one, like 25 percent. Add to that the fact that I was the first (or at least, the only) editor ever hired from out of state (in our daily meetings, pretty much everyone was a USC grad except for the guy who was ostracized for having gone to Clemson), and there simply did not exist a procedure for compensating such new hires for their moving expenses. My boss fiddled the books (legally, acting within he rightful prerogatives) to give me an extra $1,000 in my first paycheck to help me out with that. I went with the cheapest deal with the movers I could get — we did all the packing, in our own boxes — and we drove a lot of stuff ourselves crammed into our two vehicles like the Clampetts heading for California. With needing to stop for the kids, it took us four days to get here. And the move still cost me $1,500 out of my own pocket, which cleaned out our savings account.

We rented because we couldn't afford to buy, and we kept putting food on the table by my wife taking in other kids to care for them along with our four (our fifth was born here the following year).

And THAT year, thanks to Ronald Reagan's tax "reform," was the first time I EVER had to pay more than had been deducted from my paycheck. In fact, I think it still stands as the ONLY time, but I'm not positive; I'd need to check.

So needless to say, I didn't think much of what the Gipper had done for me. Maybe somebody benefited — Gordon Gekko or somebody — but it was pretty painful for me and mine, hitting me in probably the worst year of my adult life for such an unexpected expense.

Not that we should make tax policy based on how it affects yours truly. I'll leave such arguments as that to my libertarian friends. I'm just saying Mr. Geddings' letter struck a chord with me.

The sheriff’s dilemma

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Hey, y'all leave my twin Leon alone. The sheriff's got enough problems without folks giving him a hard time for saying he wants to apply the law equally. (And no, y'all haven't been piling on so much here on the blog, but I keep reading the letters and so forth…)

That said, I find myself wondering: Is there a case here to prosecute? I mean, are there precedents that lead one to think this is a case worth pursuing?

The theory in favor of the sheriff going after Michael Phelps goes like this: A rich, white, international celebrity shouldn't skate for doing something that poor, obscure, black kids do time for. That sounds good. Equality before the law and all that.

But I wonder: How many of those poor, obscure, black kids were put away on the basis of the sheriff having heard that they smoked dope at some time in the past, accompanied by a photo that in and of itself is vague. If the alleged perp weren't admitting it, we wouldn't know that was him, or that he was actually smoking dope through that bong. (Before you scoff, I had a good friend in college — a boy from Clio, as it happens — who had shoulder-length hair, and who liked to use Zig-Zags to roll himself a joint made of pure pipe tobacco. If not for the sweet smell, no one would have believed that wasn't dope. But it wasn't. It takes all kinds to make a world, you know.)

If you make me pick a number, I'd say the number of guys doing time at the Alvin Glenn center, or in the state pen, who were put away on that sort of evidence would be approximately zero. Generally speaking, if you're not holding at the time of arrest, the cops don't bother, right? So how is this equality of the law, speaking in terms of way things actually work in the world?

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the prisons are full of people who were nailed when somebody posted a picture of them apparently toking on MySpace. I'd be quite interested to hear evidence to that effect.

Graham helps me make my mind up about stimulus (It’s bad.)

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First you might want to watch the above video, but if you can't be bothered, at least read what Lindsey Graham had to say to Democrats yesterday:

You can blame George Bush all you want to, but he didn't write this bill, y'all did. This is your bill. It needs to be America's bill. And we may get three or four Republicans to vote with you, but let me tell you what the country is going to inherit if we pass this bill in terms of substance and process. We're going to lose the ability as members of Congress to go to the public and say, Give us some money, let us borrow more of your money to fix housing, because this bill stinks.

The process that's led to this bill stinks. There is no negotiating going on here! Nobody is negotiating! We're making this up as we go! The polling numbers are scaring the hell out of everybody, and they're in a panic. They're running from one corner of the Capitol to the other to try to cobble votes together to lower the cost of the bill to say we solved the problem. This is not the way you spend a trillion dollars!

Here's the thing about this that makes up my mind on the bill he was commenting on: As he said in the interview that followed that clip at the start of the above video, Lindsey Graham believes we need a stimulus. He's not one of these GOP ideologues who opposes all spending and supports all tax cuts. And he, a very smart guy who speaks authoritatively from the sensible center — you know he'll work with the Democrats when they make sense, and stand with the rest of the GOP against them when they don't — indicts the legislation most persuasively.

Before, I was just worried about the legislation. Now, I believe that passing nothing (for now; before long something needs to pass) is better than passing the bill the House and Senate Democrats have been pushing.

Y’all listen in, now, ya heah?

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Well, this is something new. I just now got down in my external e-mail far enough to see this item from 9:37 this morning:

**Press Conference Call**

White House Domestic Policy Council Brief for Southern Reporters on American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan

WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Thursday, February 5, at 1:30 p.m. ET, Melody Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council, will discuss the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan on a press conference call with southern reporters.  Barnes will discuss the impacts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan and answer questions.

WHO:              White House Domestic Policy Council Director Melody Barnes

WHAT:            Press conference call

WHEN:            Thursday, February 5, 2009

                          1:30 p.m. ET

Well, looks like I missed it. (They might not have let me in anyhow, since although I'm Southern by birth and inclination, I haven't held the title of "reporter" since 1980.) So I'm left to guess. Do you think it was just like the briefing for the Yankee reporters, except they talked slower and said y'all a lot? Did they say, "Don't y'all tell a soul, but we're gonna give y'all extra heppin's of stimulus and treat the Yankees like red-headed stepchildren?" Did they use metaphors only we'd understand, involving field peas and the Chicken Curse?

I don't know; I'm left to wonder. And one of the things I wonder is, why couldn't Robert Gibbs have handled this briefing? You'd think it would be right up his alley. Although she was born in Virginia, and did undergraduate at Chapel Hill, is Melody Barnes a real Southerner? Who's her Daddy? How did she end up working for Ted Kennedy, and belonging to the New York Bar Association? Mercy sakes alive… I reckon I'd understand a heap more if Ah'd been able to listen in…

DeMint gets face time

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Here's an irony for you:

The story today on the stimulus bill is about how such Senate moderates as Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Republican Susan Collins of Maine are reshaping the legislation. And yet who's getting his picture in the papers? Jim DeMint, who is nobody's notion of a moderate.

He appeared, looming large, on Page 3 of The Wall Street Journal with a story headlined "GOP Wields More Influence Over the Stimulus Bill." That's the picture above. Which sort of makes you think Jim DeMint is one of those "wielding more influence." In fact, his image is being used on the promo for "top stories" on the paper's Web site. But… he's not mentioned in the story. So the picture, apparently, gives a false impression.

I haven't looked at the print version of The New York Times today, but I saw this story on the Web, headlined "Centrists in Senate Push to Cut Billions From Stimulus." Guess whose picture adorns it (along with others; it's a group shot)? Yep — non-centrist Jim DeMint. Then guess who is NOT mentioned in the story? You got it.

Hey, fellas — you want to try coordinating with the guys in photo next time, so that your art actually GOES WITH the story?

In case you wondered how this happened: Well, it's a story with a lot of moving parts, and different media folk are following different parts of it. Those photos are from The Associated Press. The running AP story on the stimulus DOES mention DeMint — as having played a leading role in an unsuccessful effort…

Despite bipartisan concerns about the cost, Republicans failed in a series of attempts on Wednesday to cut back the bill's size.

The most sweeping proposal, advanced by Sen. Jim DeMint, a Republican, would have eliminated all the spending and replaced it with a series of tax cuts. It was defeated 61-36.

… which means he's no longer a part of the story of the developing bill. But the picture remains.

This marks one of those rare occasions when our junior senator steals a march on our senior one, mediawise. Our senior senator was at the same press conference as DeMint (see below). But he wasn't in either of the pictures chosen by the two aforementioned papers. Nor was he mentioned in either of their stories, or the AP story.

So much for Lindsey Graham, media hog extraordinaire.

Just an interesting little irony that I noticed in all my reading on the subject, and thought I'd share…

The editorial I didn’t write for tomorrow

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My plans for the day had included writing an editorial on the stimulus bill currently stumbling its way through the U.S. Senate, but then I spoke to someone in Washington who said it COULD pass tonight. If I knew it were going to pass tonight, and had some idea how it would end up, I could write about how it and the House version should be reconciled. If I knew it WEREN'T going to pass tonight, I could write about what should happen to it in the Senate before it passes. Not knowing, and not having started writing (and having a bunch of other stuff I need to be doing today), we'll be going with a local piece that one of my colleagues has almost finished instead.

But here are some of the points that I would have wanted to make:

  • The House bill is a nonstarter. I thought David Broder did a good job of explaining how it got that way in his Sunday column. Nancy Pelosi has done another partisan number on the country similar to what she did on the TARP bill a couple of months back. And the Republicans were only too happy to oblige her by voting against it unanimously. That means the $300 billion or so in tax cuts that were there to garner GOP support is wasted money (they are far too small and unfocused to do the taxpapers any appreciable good, so their ONLY theoretical value was political), without even getting into the waste the Democrats added for pet projects. A mess that would prove to be an overall waste in the end. A lot spent without giving the needed boost to the economy.
  • Kudos to the moderates in both parties — Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Susan Collins of Maine in particular — for working together to strip out some of the worst spending provisions. (As for our own Senate moderate — I'm thinking Lindsey Graham is supporting those efforts, based on statements I've seen, and if I were writing an editorial I would check to nail that down. But I'm not. I do know I haven't seen him mentioned in the national stories I've read.)
  • But as great as it is that we're getting rid of some of the worst spending ideas, is a SMALLER stimulus bill what we're aiming for? I don't often agree with Paul Krugman, but he IS a Nobel winner in economics, and I have found persuasive his arguments that Obama's proposed stimulus, even if all of it is properly focused, isn't big enough to give the jolt the economy needs. So rather than CUTTING stuff from it, should we not be trying to FOCUS the spending that's there into more productive channels? Such as, more shovel-ready infrastructure… In other words, it's good that the moderates want to prevent wasteful spending, but isn't the problem less the size of the stimulus (which as Krugman says, may not be large enough), but what it's being spent on?
  • The Buy American stuff — the latter-day Smoot-Hawley — should go. After a piece I read in the WSJ this morning, which sort of crystalized my half-formed thoughts on the matter, I'm more concerned about this than I was yesterday. If I had written the editorial, though, I'd have had to reach an agreement with one of my colleagues who is not as much of a free-trader as I am. Since I'm not writing the piece, we're not pausing in our work today to have that argument.

As you see, it would have been a fairly complicated editorial, pulling in many different directions, reflecting the complexity of the legislation and the lack of clear sense — on my part, on the Senators' part, on the House's part, on everybody's part (except for the ideologues who SAY they know what to do, but don't) — of exactly what will cure what ails the nation's economy.

Increasingly, I am pessimistic that what finally emerges and gets signed by the president will lead in any obvious way to the kind of dramatic improvement in economic activity that we need. That can further a crisis of confidence in everything from the new president to our ability to effect our own recovery in any way. And that can lead to depression, in more than one sense of the word.

(Oh, and before you comment that my thoughts on this are half-baked and incomplete — well, duh. I told you, this is the editorial I didn't write, so I haven't gone the extra mile of refining and reconciling these various points, as I made very clear above. Having done a bunch of reading and thinking about it, though, I thought I'd toss these points out for y'all to discuss. In case that's not obvious.)

‘Buy American’

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Obama has sided with Republicans and biz types in opposing congressional Democrats' "Buy American" provisions in the stimulus bill, much to the chagrin of the Big Labor lobby.

I thought I had made up my mind on this when I read a story in the WSJ that put Obama on one side, and Harry Reid on the other (my instinct in such a choice is to go with Obama, every time). Besides, I'm a free-trader, and one of my beefs with Obama during the election is that he wasn't.

But when I mentioned that this morning, one of my colleagues strongly disagreed. She said (helping you guess who it was) that if taxpayers were putting up the dough, of course it should stay in this country.

Me, I don't want to take the global economy back to a bunch of little protectionist islands. If the economy starts to recover anywhere, I want the growth to flow freely. But I saw my colleague's argument.

Then, former U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Wilkins (below) came to see us this afternoon, and he talked about how our good friends in the Great White North — our biggest trading partners, the people we get the largest amount of oil from, etc. — are absolutely freaking out about the "Buy American" thing. And with good reason, from their perspective. And they are our good friends and allies. So I value their opinion.

Looking around, I see that Paul "Nobel Prize in Economics" Krugman is no help — on his blog, he argues it both ways (although I admit, I understand his anti-protectionist argument better than his wonkish one to the contrary).

What do you think?

People like that re-form — maybe we should get us some

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Thought y'all might find these two press releases, both having to do with a bill to put the Employment Security Commission under the governor, edifying.

First, we have one from Speaker Bobby Harrell, who manages to damn the governor's performance as an economic developer while faintly praising the notion of putting him in charge:

    "This is just another example of the House’s many efforts to restructure and
streamline government. Given recent events, we feel this is the right thing to
do and the proper time to do it.  Moving
the Employment Security Commission under a Department of Workforce will increase
efficiencies and the sharing of crucial employment data but this move alone will
not solve our state’s third worst in the nation unemployment rate, that solution
depends more on job creation not job placement. 
That being said, placing both job creation and job placement agencies
under the executive branch should provide another tool the Governor can use to
take the steps necessary to lower our state’s 9.5% unemployment rate."

… since he obviously hasn't been able to do it yet, he doesn't quite say. As you know, Bobby's never thought a whole lot of the performance of the gov's Commerce Department.

But as much fun as it may be to pick that statement apart, the Speaker's right both ways — South Carolinians are worse off since Mark Sanford became governor, and there's no good reason why the governor should not be over the ESC. In a properly balanced system of government, separate branches of government — legislative vs. executive, executive vs. judicial, etc. — need to have separate bases of power and different lines of accountability. Two entities within the executive branch do NOT.

But the ESC does not agree, and put out this release today:

SCESC Commission Responds to Legislative "Reform" Bill

For Immediate Release                                                                           February 4, 2009

    An economic recession, a high unemployment rate and an unprecedented number of people receiving benefits have led the Governor and several legislators to question the integrity of the S.C. Employment Security Commission.
    The problems currently affecting the system are economic, not systemic, as attested by the fact that other states with similarly high unemployment are also borrowing money to pay benefits.
    The Employment Security Commission’s main concern continues to be addressing the critical the needs of the over 100,000 unemployed citizens of our state through the administering of unemployment benefits, helping individuals to find available jobs and providing a variety of Labor Market Information to both employers, jobseekers and the general public.
    At the same time, the agency is working to provide additional jobs data that the Governor has requested. We will also work closely with the state legislature to assist them in any way possible.
    We have faith in our employees and in the integrity of our system, which has continued to provide excellent employment service to the people of this state for over seventy years.

Don't you love the touch of putting "reform" in quotation marks? In bringing this release to my attention today, a colleague said, "Yes, it's tame. But I find it rather extraordinary that an agency would put out a news release essentially attacking a bill that was introduced to restructure it. Even DHEC doesn't do THAT." If you'll recall, DHEC Commissioner Earl Hunter confined himself to an internal memo — and apparently some informal networking that persuaded allies to back away from reform (or so I infer from the pattern of events).

Here's the thing, folks: The ESC is right to say that the governor's criticism is largely off-base, and willfully ignores the reality of mounting unemployment in this state (preferring to blame it on inefficiency in the agency, because he believes gummint is to blame for everything, and can never be the solution). But the governor's right to gripe when the ESC stonewalls him on information.

The bottom line is that there shouldn't be any political space for these two sides to be fighting. The ESC ought to have to do what the governor says, and the governor shouldn't be able to shirk his responsibility to the people of this state by blaming climbing unemployment on those people over there.

That's why we need to get us some of that re-form, Daddy.

How dumb can an unfunded mandate get?

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I've never compiled an All-Time, Top Five List of Dumbest Unfunded Mandates Ever, but if I did, Robert Ford's "idea" (I'm using the word loosely, hence the quote marks) to require local gummints to take off on Confederate Memorial Day would certainly make the list. There's nothing new about it, of course — he's pushed this one before — but hey, a classic is a classic.

I find myself wondering whether Sen. Ford and Glenn McConnell are going to go back on the TV circuit with their Separate Heritages act — you know, McConnell in full Confederate dress-up; Ford in dashiki talking Black Liberation — or maybe they already have done that again in this cause, and (mercifully) I missed it.

In case you know not whereof I speak, the two Charlestonians, in a determined effort to show us all that there IS something odd in the water down there, went about in costume a few years back emphasizing that black and white South Carolinians should be encouraged in celebrating their very separate heritages — as though we have naught in common. Brilliant.

I didn’t get a harrumph out of that guy…

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Being an editor is often a thankless job, but you get these little rewards now and then. Such as this one, which probably wouldn't mean anything to anyone who doesn't love words as much as I do, but was a nice treat for me…

One of my colleagues had used "harrumphed" in an editorial I was editing, and I decided that I would check the spelling, on the off chance that it was actually in the Webster's New World College Dictionary, which is the one we use as an official arbiter in our style rules.

And it was! Which I thought was way cool. Also, I believe it's correct to call it an onomatopoeia, which doubles the fun, since that's a fun word to say.

Finally, it allowed me to use my favorite line from "Blazing Saddles" as a blog headline.

And who says editors don't have fun?

What if Khameini’s not in charge, either?

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Something that occurs to me whenever geopolitical boffins assure us, oh so wisely, that we're letting ourselves be distracted by a mere functionary when we listen to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, since as we all know, in reality, that Ayatollah Khameini is the guy in charge, as Roger Cohen does here…

    Can revolutionary Iran live without “Death to America?” Powerful hard-line Iranian factions think not, but I’m with the majority of Iranians who believe their Islamic Republic can coexist with a functioning U.S. relationship.
    Obama should do five other things: Address his opening to the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, because he decides. State that America is not in the Iranian regime-change game. Act soon rather than wait for the June Iranian presidential elections; Khamenei will still be around after them. Start with small steps that build trust. Treat the nuclear issue within the whole range of U.S.-Iranian relations rather than as its distorting focus.

… is this: How do ya know that Khameini's in charge? What if the thing that "everybody who knows anything knows" is wrong? Maybe, to borrow a phrase from Frank Herbert, it's "a feint within a feint within a feint."

Maybe Ahmadinejad is really the power behind Khameini. Or, more likely, another lesser-known mullah is manipulating Khameini. Or maybe some guy we never heard of, maybe someone completely unlikely — say, some survivor of the Shah's secret police — is really pulling all the mullahs' strings…

In a system that is designed NOT to be transparent — unlike liberal democracies in the West — we should assume that there is much we don't know. Of course, that also means that before we go "negotiating with the Iranians" with all the best will in the world, we know who it is we should be talking to. Personally, I'm not convinced that anyone does know. Talk, by all means. But at the same time, keep asking (at the very least, asking yourself) the question that Chili Palmer asked in "Get Shorty:" "But first I want to know who I'm talking to. Am I talking to you, or am I talking to him?"

Or maybe I'm just being paranoid today. But when you're talking about a country whose nominal leader wants Israel not to exist, which is trying like crazy to get The Bomb, which is the power and the juice behind the Sadrists in Iraq, Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and seems to have a relationship with Sunni Syria not unlike that which Barzini had with Tataglia, a reasonable man would get a little paranoid… Maybe, when Obama and/or Hillary chat with these guys, they should bring along both a Mentat and a Bene Gesserit, just to cover all the bases…

The private sector (a tiny part of it, that is) meets accountability (sorta kinda)

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Let me call your attention to the David Brooks column (what, him again?) that I chose for tomorrow's op-ed page, in which he chronicles the relatively new phenomenon in which honchos in the private sector are held publicly accountable for the kind of wasteful foolishness that they normally get away with completely and utterly:

    Then there are the Wall Street executives who were suddenly attacked from the White House for giving out the same sort of bonuses they’ve been giving out for years. Now there is Tom Daschle, who is being criticized for making $5 million off his Senate prestige.
    I’m afraid there are rich people all around the country who are about to suffer similar social self-immolation because they don’t understand that the rules of privileged society have undergone a radical transformation.
    The essence of the problem is this: Rich people used to set their own norms. For example, if one rich person wanted to use the company helicopter to aerate the ponds on his properties, and the other rich people on his board of directors thought this a sensible thing to do, then he could go ahead and do it without any serious repercussions.
    But now, after the TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package, the Fed rescue packages and various other federal interventions, rich people no longer get to set their own rules. Now lifestyle standards for the privileged class are set by people who live in Ward Three.

Mr. Brooks goes on to poke fun at the bureaucrats and others (who live in Ward Three in D.C.) who suddenly are in a position to pass judgment on the Fat Cats…

… thereby missing the larger point that what is happening here is that for once, the denizens of the private boardroom are being held accountable — in the manner to which gummint is accustomed to being held accountable — to people with a differing world view.

One of the great ironies is that the anti-gummint types I argue with here on the blog all the time largely hold the views that they do because we in the sin-stained MSM spend so much of our time telling them about the outrageous waste and foolishness in the public sector, whereas almost no one ever tells them about the equal foolishness and waste that is normally shrouded in the private sector. And why is that? Because we see it as our mission to hold the public sector accountable. But when the private sector wants a bailout, it needs to understand it will have to play by the same rules for once.

Once you go public, you don't get to make up the rules any more.

Thank you, Simone… (No problem whatsoever!)

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Apparently, someone at Vermont University didn't want Ben Stein there talking about "the great What?…. Depression," or anything else:

    In other venues, Stein has expressed opinions critical of evolutionary theory and in favor of intelligent design, for which he has been sharply criticized in academic circles. He has also offered views on the role of science in the Holocaust that some have found offensive. Fogel said he had been only "vaguely aware" of these controversial views.
    After UVM announced Stein's selection Thursday, Fogel said in a written statement, "profound concerns have been expressed to me by persons both internal and external to the university about his selection." Fogel said he received hundreds of e-mails beginning Saturday — including only about a half-dozen from people at UVM — contending, generally, that Stein's views of science were "affronts to the basic tenets of the academy."
    "Once I apprised Mr. Stein of these communications, he immediately and most graciously declined his commencement invitation," Fogel's statement said.

And the culture wars go on and on and on… Bueller? Bueller?

Well, if you MUST know…

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For this post, I should create several new blog categories, such as "Way more than you wanted to know," and "Extreme disclosure" and … oh, I don't know what.

Anyway, some of you asked yesterday where I was ("Where the heck is Brad?" quoth KP). Some of you divined political import in my absence from the blog for a day. Back in the second take of comments on this post — the 41st comment, I believe (16 after you click on "Next") — I answered the question. I'm not going to repeat the explanation, on the grounds that some of you may be possessed of delicate sensibilities. If you're curious enough, you can go look. And after you do, don't ever accuse me of not being in favor of full disclosure.

Perhaps this would be a good time to remind y'all that:

a) I don't actually get paid an additional dime for blogging; and
b) even if I did, I might occasionally get a weekday off, at the very least for medical purposes.

But hey, I appreciate the concern. And everything was fine, by the way.

One Democrat fed up with tax deadbeats

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So you think all this stuff about Geithner and Daschle and their taxes is a bunch of Republican spin? Well, maybe it is, but I got an earful about it from one ardent Democrat this morning.

Samuel Tenenbaum, key Energy Party think-tanker, dropped by my breakfast table this morning. This is always an occasion for me to find out what is at the top of his mind — which can range from his 55-mph speed limit plan to endowed chairs (which were also his idea) to, well, almost anything. Samuel reads a lot, and cares a lot, about a heap of stuff.

But today he was fed up with Obama over the tax deadbeats he's been choosing for his administration. He was going on about how this was not the Change he had believed in when he supported Obama. At first, I thought he was mad because the new POTUS wasn't cutting these people loose once the news broke about their failure to pay. But no, he blamed Obama for not having sufficiently vetted these guys to begin with.

Paying your taxes is basic and fundamental, he maintained, and there's just no excuse for nominating people who haven't done that.

Anyway, Samuel convinced me of one thing for sure — that I should at the least put up a post to give y'all a chance to sound off on the subject. Yeah, I'm a little late, since Daschle withdrew his name today, but hey, I was out on medical leave yesterday (nothing serious; routine testing).

How can you tell who that is with the bong?

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One thing I'll say for Michael Phelps — he had plausible deniability on the bong photo, which I didn't actually look at until today, and which you can see here. If he hadn't admitted that was him, I wouldn't know.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about that…

… except this: The Brit tabloid said, "THIS is the astonishing picture which could destroy the career of the greatest competitor in Olympic history."

Which made ME think: Hasn't he sort of already had his career as a "competitor in Olympic history"? I mean, he won the 8 medals, right? Did we think he was going to win 8 gold medals again, or what? Are we then talking NOT about his career as a competitor in the Olympics, but rather his career as what? An endorser? What?

I don't know. The whole getting-excited-about-people-as-celebrities thing is something I don't get anyway. The News of the World, judging by its Web site, probably knows way more about that stuff than I do.

Joe Riley’s crime initiative

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One day last week I was pleased to run into Charleston Mayor Joe Riley (one of the finest examples of Joe-ness holding office today) on an elevator downtown. He was in town to lobby the Legislature for his crime bill — of which I had to admit I had not heard (how's that for an awkward avoidance of a dangling preposition?). He was joined by Attorney General Henry McMaster and SLED Chief Reggie Lloyd in pushing the legislation.

By the time we had arrived at his floor, he had given me a brief outline of it. Fortunately, he also had a staffer send me this release about it
, since I wasn't taking notes on the elevator. The group was pushing for legislation that would, among other things:

  • Allow law enforcers to search people on probation and parole without warrants.
  • Deny bail for repeat offenders.
  • Forbid convicted felons to possess handguns or assault weapons.
  • Increase the penalty for Assault and Battery With Intent to Kill. (On the elevator, the mayor had said something about S.C. lacking an effective attempted murder statute.)
  • Create a separate offense for possessing a firearm while selling, manufacturing, or possessing drugs for distribution.

The mayor seems to be pushing separately (going by the wording on the release), more resources for courts, Solicitor's offices, Probation and Parole, DJJ, and Corrections. Specifically, on that last point, increase funding for drug rehab in prisons.

Here's a story about it in the Charleston paper.

Most of that stuff makes common sense to me, although as with a lot of things that make sense, I wonder where the money will come from with the state cutting back on everything. Anyway, since I ran into the mayor and he shared these proposals with me, I'm sharing them with you.

An intolerable failure to communicate

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
First, some sobering perspective: Some of you reading this will not have a job next month.
    As bad as things were through November, the bottom really dropped out in December. South Carolina lost another 22,000 jobs that month. Nationally, 2.5 million jobs were lost last year — the most since 1945 — and of those, 524,000 were lost in December alone. To do that math for you, if the rest of the year had been as bad as December, we’d have been down 6.29 million jobs. And to do the same for South Carolina: Our state lost 54,100 jobs in 2008. If the whole year had been as bad as December, we’d have lost 264,000.
    These things have a rippling effect — a business cuts back, more people lose their paychecks, they spend less in their community, so other businesses have to cut back, and so forth. So there is little reason to doubt that January (when we get those figures) will be worse than December, or February worse than January. Just as an early indication of that, the state Employment Security Commission said last week that in January it was paying out $19 million to $20 million a week, up from $13 million to $15 million a week in December.
    One more thing to note, in case you don’t know it: As bad as things are nationally, they are worse here. The national unemployment rate is 7.2 percent; in South Carolina it’s 9.5 percent.
    Got the picture? All right, then; let’s turn from tragedy to low farce — the ongoing spitting match between our governor and the aforementioned Employment Security Commission.
    You know how our Legislature likes to cut taxes? Well, back in the late ’90s, it cut the tax that businesses pay into a trust fund from which unemployment benefits are paid. It made sense at the time, given the fund surplus. But since 2001, the state has been paying out more each year in unemployment benefits than the trust fund has taken in. Only in 2006 was the amount taken in even close to the amount paid.
    So it is that, in light of the unemployment figures cited above, the ESC ran out of money and sought federal help to keep issuing checks. Unfortunately, the agency couldn’t get the money unless the governor signed off on the request. In most states, this would make sense, but in South Carolina — where only a third of the executive branch reports to the elected chief executive, with the ESC not being a part of that third — it can be awkward, especially with this governor.
    Gov. Mark Sanford said he wouldn’t OK the request until the agency provided him with certain information. The ESC didn’t provide the information, and things escalated. The governor claimed the agency was wasteful and incompetent, and demanded an audit. The ESC, absurdly, resisted. Finally, after fighting about this most of the month of December, everyone climbed off their high horses long enough for the governor to OK the request.
    Then, the ESC realized that things were getting worse and it would need even more money. The governor went ballistic. The commission resumed stonewalling him. The governor threatened to fire the commissioners.
    On Thursday, the commissioners — Chairman McKinley Washington, Becky Richardson and Billy McLeod — met with our editorial board, and said they would have 90 percent to 95 percent of what the governor wanted to him by Feb. 9.
    In the course of this interview, I asked: “Have y’all met as a group with the governor?” I got a chorus of simultaneous answers: “No.” “Absolutely not.” “Never.” (You can watch a video clip of this exchange on my blog.) Had they ever sought such a meeting? Oh, certainly, they said.
    “This is the only governor,” said Mr. Washington, “that never met with the Employment Security Commission that I know of; I’ve been there eight years.” Mr. McLeod said the same was true for his 20 years.
    As bizarre as this may sound to anyone not familiar with Mr. Sanford and his ways, it was believable. But Sanford spokesman Joel Sawyer said the governor had met with them, and he produced a letter, from agency Executive Director Ted Halley, which began, “The Commission and I would thank you and your staff for taking time from your busy schedules recently to meet with us.” It was dated March 25, 2003.
    I asked Mr. Washington on Friday about this. He said that the meeting was actually with Eddie Gunn, then the governor’s deputy chief of staff. He said at one point “The governor stuck his head in the door, said hello… and that was it.” So why the letter? “That was just a courtesy statement, but he did not meet with us.” He added, “You try to be nice.”
    This, ladies and gentlemen, is pathetic. Let’s say the governor’s version of events is true and Mr. Washington’s is wrong: His defense is that he met with the commissioners once, almost six years ago.
    Bottom line: None of this idiocy would be happening if the governor were responsible for this agency, which he should be.
    What! you cry — give this governor what he wants? Never! And indeed, this governor who claims to want greater authority for his office is, by his actions, the worst argument for such change that we have seen in many a year.
    But consider: If he had been responsible for the agency and its mission all along, he never would have been able to play this blame game. As long as the agency is out of his reach, he can snipe at it, and gripe and complain, and blame those people over there, rather than take responsibility. He shouldn’t do that, and most governors wouldn’t. But since this one can, he does, and he gets away with it. (And by being so intransigent and defensive, the agency helps him.)
    Given the growing number of people in this state who rely on this agency to enable them to put food on the table in their hour of greatest need, this absurd failure to communicate is intolerable.

For video and more, please go to thestate.com/bradsblog/.